


Gateway

by Prochytes



Category: We Hunt Together (TV)
Genre: Adultery, F/M, Post-Canon, Smut, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:54:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26425219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prochytes/pseuds/Prochytes
Summary: Adultery – the most bourgeois possible way to wrong someone.
Relationships: Lola Franks/Jackson Mendy





	Gateway

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the whole run of the show. Angst, swearing, and references to substance addiction.

Metal goads the small of Jackson Mendy’s back, just where his shirt has squirmed free of his belt. Might be a mutinous spring; could just about be a coin, if it’s a fifty. Jackson hopes – quite fervently, in fact – that the object is not of that ilk which the reports he writes describe as ‘paraphernalia’. DS Lola Franks, embarked upon her therapy, should not still be chasing the dragon. But DS Lola Franks shouldn’t be fucking her superior officer into her settee, either, so that’s a datum of limited application.

Jackson has had sex with exactly one woman in twenty years – and, for the last two or three of them, not much. Lola knows this. Jackson knows that Lola knows this because he told her the day they met (“the exactly one woman” bit, anyway – he has no doubt that she is smart enough to have extrapolated the rest from subsequent conversations). With the wisdom of hindsight, this might have been too much to share on a first corpse.

Lola, like Jo, is not a slight woman, but her body is springing surprises of bone and muscle where Jo’s does not. It’s the legacy of an active lifestyle, and also smack. Jackson flashes back, again, to the earliest moments of their acquaintance: his new DS’s iron indifference to vertiginous flights of stairs, eyes on the prize while he wheezed in her wake. Prophetic, if you liked that sort of thing.

He shouldn’t have insisted on driving Lola home, even if it was the day that Freddy Lane finally went down for what she’d done. They hadn’t been in the courtroom when the judge passed sentence. Jackson’s Inbox had already been boasting more flags than a regatta. Life went on – and death, by whomsoever engineered. But Lola had wanted so much to be there – to look, once more, on the perfect porcelain face of what she histrionically calls ‘Evil’, and he calls… he calls… (Jackson buries his face, for a moment, in the sweaty fall of Lola’s hair, and, with it, the thought of Freddy’s parting wink.)

***

_A twelve-stretch. A_ fucking _twelve-stretch. She’ll be out before there’s a single line on that flawless fucking forehead, with a plan to screw over some other poor sap beneath it. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck._ If Lola had actually _said_ any of that, after the phone-call, back in the office, rather than burning it into every available surface with her glare, would Jackson be here now, shuddering up into the roll of her supple weight? Would such a cathartic outburst have allayed his fear of Lola going home and doing something rash, alone – that she might err, even, in those haphazard calculations that stand between a smackhead and the morgue? Action is a river that rises from too many tributaries to count: this is so – this _must_ be so. (Again, the memory of that slow wink. Jackson’s fingers dig spasmodically into Lola’s shoulders; she rides the pain out with a hiss.) Could words have averted this antiphony of gasps?

Instead, there was silence. Silence in Jackson’s car (Lola’s had just failed its MOT), after he vetoed her plan to take a cab. Silence on the doorstep, while, to fill the void, he developed the analogy of his new-model marriage to stagnant water. (Jo – of whom he mustn’t think, not now – once accused Jackson of performative whimsy, of ponderously arranging _jeux d’esprit_ for display in his conversation like the junk Emily put in her shop-window beside Bagpuss.) Silence, while Lola sought her door-keys, and he discoursed upon flora that thrived in swamps.

(Lola, with that twitchy deft celerity of hers, breaks Jackson’s grip upon her shoulders. She thrusts his hands outwards and down; his left traps itself in the gap between the cushions of the sofa. Jackson’s fingers skim across the crud that loiters there: the crumbs and buttons and broken dreams. The rest of his tactile world is now all long, strong legs, and the wet answering heat between them.)

***

“You don’t believe in punishment, do you?” Lola asked, abruptly, when they were just inside the door, and Jackson ran out of puff on symbolic marsh marigolds. “Stands to reason. You don’t believe in guilt, so you can’t believe in punishment.”

“I don’t believe in either. But sometimes…” The wheelchair had trailed pondweed like a bridal veil, when they finally fished it from the water. “… sometimes, I wish I could.”

Resurgent silence. His DS gave him a long, appraising stare. Then, with shocking force ( _when she squeezed me tight, she nearly broke my spine…_ ), Lola slammed Jackson up against the wall and pressed her body length to length on his, fingers tearing at his flies with the intent ferocity she applied to packets of party hoops at the office. Which led to some disrobing; which led to an awkward mutual reel across the floor-space; which led to… here.

***

Lola is close, now – very close. Jackson thinks he can just about stay the course. This sofa may yet prove to be his Waterloo. The cushion has worked itself free, as soft furnishings are inopportunely wont to do. If Jackson botches this balancing act, he knows that it will see-saw, and tip both him and Lola on the carpet. Jackson found this out the hard way in the living-room of Jo’s parents’ house on Boxing Day, 2003. He is rediscovering, in adultery, all the banalities of marriage.

 _Adultery._ DCI Jackson Mendy, here and now, is betraying his (admittedly wayward) wife, with his emotionally fragile, junkie, subordinate officer. The hot flush of shame suffuses him; Lola lets out one last keening cry. He understands.

Adultery – the most bourgeois possible way to wrong someone. The gateway drug. Jackson said to Lola Franks, the woman he once accused of being addicted to guilt, that he wanted to believe in it. With junkie generosity, she’s just shared her needle.

Lola watches the revelation on Jackson’s face. She looks away, as the tears begin.

FINIS

**Author's Note:**

> Jackson remembers a passage from the song "Lola", by the Kinks, and also a translation of a line ("Emma retrouvait dans l'adultère toutes les platitudes du mariage.") from Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary".


End file.
